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вторник, 27 декабря 2011 г.

Patent Wars - Real and Fake

To start with, let me say something anti-tech to you, guys. Namely, I’d love to send you my sincere congrats on Christmas and upcoming New Year holidays and wish you all to be healthy, happy, loving and loved, wealthy, and always optimistic!

Now to the point.

I’ve been perusing the patent wars topic for quite a long time, much because of Apple vs. Samsung War both in technological and design aspects of their products, and at one point I got completely stunned with how many infringement cases we can now find within the whole IT industry.

It’s true, that the possibility to produce something utterly unique is more, than hard. It’s also pretty hard to handle the fast tempo of market development and expansion to resist the growing competition with the rivals. What else can you do to let your business survive and, moreover, prosper? Of course, you can copy the technology, or the designs, or the marketing moves, or anything else. Obviously, the morality or professional ethics have nothing to do with this situation; it’s the money, which turns out decisive.

In this respect, the amazement at the patent wars is no longer this big, as you understand, that as much as everyone in the IT business wishes to earn, it’s highly essential not to let your competitor earn more, especially at your cost.

Nonetheless, the matter of patent wars has one more essential aspect, which is even trickier, than everything lying on the surface. That is the fake patent wars. They are not, in fact, fake, rather – as real as it’s only possible, but the essence of the claims is frequently groundless. “One small company” formulates the reason for suing “the large company”, and the story begins. The thing is that there’s always the notion of luck, which can be helfpul in court, and there’s always the company’s image put on stake, when the enterprise is sued. These 2 factors are what can make such a patent war, even if the case is totally fake, really profitable for “one small company” owners.

Fortunately, the positive side with the story about fake patent wars is that these are mostly unsuccessful for those, who start the fight. Otherwise, we’d probably witness hundreds of “real” patent wars being begun each and every day. For large companies, like Twitter, or Facebook or 4shared, having millions of users, this would be really bothersome.

In a whole, at least, it’s good that patent justice works properly for now, right?